Medical What evidence supports the hypothesis that dreams are false memories?

[JaredJames]

Does anyone else experience the fragmented precepts I speak of? I always thought it was the most common kind of dream.

All my dreams are like video as opposed to pictures.

There is sometimes only fragments, but I always experience what feels like a few minutes worth through to a full 'event'.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

All my dreams are like video as opposed to pictures.

There is sometimes only fragments, but I always experience what feels like a few minutes worth through to a full 'event'.

My dreams are never fragments, they are always long continuous story arcs. If I don't think them too much I forget but upon waking I can run through the dream from start to finish. The only discontinuities are when I wake

 

[JaredJames]

My dreams are never fragments, they are always long continuous story arcs. If I don't think them too much I forget but upon waking I can run through the dream from start to finish. The only discontinuities are when I wake

When I say fragments, I mean it's like a break in the story. It'll jump forward like a chapter skip in a DVD.

The whole story is there, I just miss bits sometimes. But the whole 'outline' for it exists.

 

[disregardthat]

It is entirely plausible that our mind connects these fragmental sensations into one coherent and continuous story. One doesn't know that the dream was like a "video", since our mind automatically fill in these gaps (sort of like the blind spot of the eye), and we can't know for sure what was dreamed and what was filled in, no matter how convinced we are.

Even in ordinary life experiences our mind strives to make sense of it all (the sensations), it orders and structures them into a coherent pattern. Bad eye-witnesses of crime scenes is a good example of this. Some can remain absolutely convinced of their perspective of the details of what happened, even though they are entirely wrong. The important part is that they remember it, even though it never happened. It is all due to how we subconsciously force incoherence into coherence.

 

[DaveC426913]

My dreams seem to string together, even though there are often "scene cuts" (which I think is really a transition from one dream fragment to another). These transitions seem normal when I'm dreaming them, and even when I'm rerunning the dream upon awakening, but they are the hardest part to describe when recounting the dream later. In my head it's a smooth flow, but the words are always "... and then I was ... sort of ... over here..." Like I lose the ability to describe something I'm thinking of.

 

[Darken-Sol]

i see patterns in my dreams that resemble waking processes. like being in a rush to get something done and forgetting a key element. in the dream it plays out over a few minutes with completely different images and story line. however in real life it may take weeks to fully happen. i was building a housing complex and had skipped framing a few things for speed so we could get the roof on. costly but necessary. the dreams i had during those weeks were filled with worry and forgeting things. none had to do with building.

 

[Pythagorean]

My dreams seem to string together, even though there are often "scene cuts" (which I think is really a transition from one dream fragment to another). These transitions seem normal when I'm dreaming them, and even when I'm rerunning the dream upon awakening, but they are the hardest part to describe when recounting the dream later. In my head it's a smooth flow, but the words are always "... and then I was ... sort of ... over here..." Like I lose the ability to describe something I'm thinking of.

Yeah, this is close to what I experience. Visually, they're scene cuts, buts there's an overall... eh, emotional feeling or something that sets the context. There's usually no audio, but a word might be prevalent, or a character might speak one word that will somehow string (or be strung upon recall) into the overarching emotional context.

In retrospect, it seems like it only takes something like ten seconds to go through this series, but much more time (minutes) to interpret it (which is where there's room for implanting false memories). I can't tell, either, whether it's really a series or it arrives randomly and gets ordered by a higher process? It seems like if it was really a series, it would be more congruent and a lower level, but it's only congruent on the interpretation level in my case.

I'll also woken up thinking my dreams actually happened for a couple seconds.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

I thought of writing this before Pythagorean posted, but was called away, so it might be a bit repetitive, but if they are what they seem, I have different types of dreams, including fragments, ones that stream, ones that can be forwarded and rewound, etc. Of those that seem to stream in a logical sequence of events, upon recalling them, the logic is not always so sound.

Regarding the op, I’ve thought of some more anecdotes to confuse the issue :).
On the side of dreams occurring during sleep, there is the incorporation of external sounds into dreams, interpreted as something different. For example, foxes will actually be crying outside, and I’ll dream I’m on an island where mutton birds are calling. The sounds outside may finish before I wake, and without knowledge of them, I’ll have recalled a dream with strange sounds.

However, I think I’ve also incorporated the sounds of an alarm or telephone ring that could only have just occurred into detailed, convoluted dreams, just prior to waking. As well, the sounds can seem to occur at the “right” moment (e.g. I dream I flick the car radio on immediately followed by the actual alarm music sounds) giving me the impression, once awake, that the dream may contain some retrospective elements.